“There was nothing more, dear?” She said, leaning back to peer up.
“ ‘Nothing more?’ What?”
She stood panting a little in the darkness, listening to some cautious yet uneasy thought that seemed to haunt her mind. “I thought—it seemed there was something we had not said, something I could not understand. But there, it is nothing! You know what a fanciful old silly I am. You do love me? Quite as much as ever?”
“More, sweetheart, more!”
“Good night again, then; and God bless you, dear.”
The outer door closed softly, the footsteps died away. Lawford still hesitated. He took hold of the stairs above his head as he stood on the landing and leaned his head upon his hands, striving calmly to disentangle the perplexity of his thoughts. His pulses were beating in his ear with a low muffled roar. He looked down between the blinds to where against the blue of the road beneath the straggling yellow beams of the lamp stood the little cart and drooping, shaggy pony, and Grisel sitting quietly there awaiting him. He shut his eyes as if in hope by some convulsive effort of mind to break through this subtle glasslike atmosphere of dream that had stolen over consciousness, and blotted out the significance, almost the meaning of the past. He turned abruptly. Empty as the empty rooms around him, unanswering were mind and heart. Life was a tale told by an idiot—signifying nothing.
He paused at the head of the staircase. And even then the doubt confronted him: Would he ever come back? Who knows? he thought; and again stood pondering, arguing, denying. At last he seemed to have come to a decision. He made his way downstairs, opened and left ajar a long narrow window in a passage to the garden beyond the kitchen. He turned on his heel as he reached the gate and waved his hand as if in a kind of forlorn mockery towards the darkly glittering windows. The drowsy pony awoke at touch of the whip.
Grisel lifted the rug and squeezed a little closer into the corner. She had drawn a veil over her face, so that to Lawford her eyes seemed to be dreaming in a little darkness of their own as he laid his hand on the side of the cart. “It’s a most curious thing,” he said, “but peeping down at you just now when the sound of the wheels came, a memory came clearly back to me of years and years ago—of my mother. She used to come to fetch me at school in a little cart like this, and a little pony just like this, with a thick dusty coat. And once I remember I was simply sick of everything, a failure, and fagged out, and all that, and was looking out in the twilight; I fancy even it was autumn too. It was a little side staircase window; I was horribly homesick. And she came quite unexpectedly. I shall never forget it—the misery, and then, her coming.” He lifted his eyes, cowed with the incessant struggle, and watched her face for some time in silence. “Ought I to stay?”
“I see no ‘ought,’ ” she said. “No one is there?”
“Only a miserable broken voice out of a broken cage—called Conscience.”
“Don’t you think, perhaps, that even that has a good many disguises—convention, cowardice, weakness, ennui; they all take their turn at hooting in its feathers? You must, you really must have rest. You don’t know; you don’t see; I do. Just a little snap, some one last exquisite thread gives way, and then it is all over. You see I have even to try to frighten you, for I can’t tell you how you distress me.”
“Why do I distress you?—my face, my story you mean?”
“No; I mean you: your trouble, that horrible empty house, and—oh, dear me, yes, your courage too.”
“Listen,” said Lawford, stooping forward. He could scarcely see the pale, veiled face through this mist that had risen up over his eyes. “I have no courage apart from you; no courage and no hope. Ask me to come!—a stranger with no history, no mockery, no miserable rant of a grave and darkness and fear behind me. Are we not all haunted—every one? That forgotten, and the fool I was, and the vacillating, and the pretence—oh, how it all sweeps clear before me; without a will, without a hope or glimpse or whisper of courage. Be just the memory of my mother, the face, the friend I’ve never seen; the voice that every dream leaves echoing. Ask me to come.”
She sat unstirring; and then as if by some uncontrollable impulse stooped a little closer to him and laid her gloved hand on his.
“I hear, you know; I hear too,” she whispered. “But—we mustn’t listen. Come now. It’s growing late.”
The little village echoed back from its stone walls the clatter of the pony’s hoofs. Night had darkened to its deepest when their lamp shone white on the wicket in the hedge. They had scarcely spoken. Lawford had simply watched pass by, almost without a thought, the arching trees, the darkening fields; had watched rise up in a mist of primrose light the harvest moon to shine in saffron on the faces and shoulders of the few wayfarers they met, or who passed them by. The still grave face beneath the shadow of its veil had never turned, though the moon poured all her flood of brilliance upon the dark profile. And once when as if in sudden alarm he had lifted his head and looked at her, a sudden doubt had assailed him so instantly that he had half put out his hand to touch her, and had as quickly withdrawn it, lest her beauty and stillness should be, even as the moment’s fancy had suggested, only a
